Giving small teams, big potential.

What can a small charity in a small town achieve? You have fewer staff than most teams - not to mention fewer donors and customers than the average UK charity shop. So, what's to be done?

Àban Outdoor might be a small shop in the Scottish Highlands, but what Kat and the team have achieved since selling online with Minimist has been anything but 'pint sized'.

"We found Minimist and it has meant that I can upload in bulk and I can get loads of items photographed in one go and uploaded. Something that would have taken me an entire day, now takes me about an hour."

As Scotland’s first outdoor wear charity shop, the store is filled with amazing adventure gear, full of all the best brands and products - but its growth has always been shaped by its location as much as its size. To truly unlock the value of its stock, Àban needed a way to reach beyond the Highlands and connect with outdoor enthusiasts across the UK.

The challenge wasn’t just time - it was making online selling scalable and worthwhile. With the right tools, e-commerce has gone from a burden to a breakthrough.

How they broke through

Before using Minimist to automate the listing process, e-commerce came with trade-offs. Listing even a small batch of items online could take hours, and large piles of donations would sit waiting for days or even weeks to be processed.

For a team of one, that kind of time investment made it difficult to justify scaling online. But with automation handling the heavy lifting - from generating listings to pricing - online selling has become not only faster, but commercially viable. What was once a slow, manual process is now a repeatable, scalable system.

"We end up with a lot of donations, which is amazing but it also means we run out of space very, very quickly. With Minimist, uploading (a big box of donations) could take me a day, where as before it would probably take me a couple of weeks"